1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to service contracts and service systems used in electronic commerce. More particularly, this invention relates to formally specified contracts describing rules for interacting with a service involving primary and sponsored roles, where the service may be provided either as a computer program, or, more generally, as an automated business process involving human agents.
2. Description of Related Art
The Internet has provoked fundamental change in the ways in which services are delivered by service providers and consumed by service customers. One trend that is beginning to emerge from this change is the development of an environment in which service customers and service providers may locate each other over the Internet. Partners negotiate terms and conditions of business electronically, connect with each other dynamically, transact business and even tear down their electronic relationships when they are no longer needed. One of the key elements of this dynamic electronic business or “e-business” is an electronic contract that describes the roles of the parties and the service level agreements (SLAs) that are negotiated between them.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,148,290 to Dan et al. discloses an electronic service contract for managing service transactions in electronic commerce. As described in FIG. 1, the electronic contract 130 captures electronic interactions among a set of business servers 110, 120. The electronic contract 130 captures explicitly all aspects of the server-to-server interactions, including transport protocol(s), document format(s), security policies (signing, non-repudiation, encryption), business roles, associated actions, responsiveness, allowable sequences of messages and exception handling. The contract is used by one or more of the parties to automatically configure their business service application and to monitor and enforce any violation during runtime interactions across business systems.
Pending U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/642,526, filed on Aug. 18, 2000, entitled “Electronic Service Level Agreement for Web Site and Computer Service Hosting” by Dan et al., discloses the use of electronic contracts for verifiable and enforceable service level agreements for Web hosting. FIG. 2 illustrates an electronic service level agreement (eSLA) 210, which specifies IT resource level metrics (e.g., response time, throughput, availability) and associated guarantees provided by the application hosting server 220 to the service application owner 230 during runtime interaction with service customers 240.
Considerable research has been ongoing on the content and structure of electronic contracts; existing work, however, typically focuses on business-level interactions and is thus on an abstraction level that is too high for the purposes of technical service management. On the other hand, work in the area of service management typically fails to take the business impact of SLAs into account. A need therefore exists for methods and systems that enable dynamic e-business by providing for the deployment and execution of electronic contract based service applications across multiple business entities.